Several days ago, Alan Jacobs (@ayjay@hcommons.social) published the following in a post entitled “Reorientation":

In times of social and political crisis, especially when new and often contradictory bulletins are arriving on our ICDs (Internet-Connected Devices) at a second-by-second rate, you and I need to step back. We need the relief. But at the same time, it is impossible, for me anyway, not to think about what’s happening. Just saying “I’m not going to read any more about this” is an inadequate response; it has a tendency to leave me fretful and at loose ends.

What helps is to read works from the past that deal with questions and challenges that are structurally similar to the ones we’re facing but that emerged in a wholly different context.

The idea of choosing works that are structurally similar to what’s going on, is an approach that uses literature, not as an escape, but rather as a means of achieving emotional distance for contemplation. I was reminded of how vaccines work by injecting a small amount of the disease into the body in order to allow the autoimmune system to strengthen itself. The works Dr. Jacobs has chosen for this moment includes Psalms, Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, and Machiavelli’s Discourses.

I’ve been trying to figure how I, as a theater historian with a background in dramatic literature, might follow Dr. Jacobs' lead. One work that sprang to mind immediately is Alfred Jarry’s bizarre and outrageous surrealist play, Ubu Roi (1896), whose central character, King Ubu, “is an antihero – fat, ugly, vulgar, gluttonous, grandiose, dishonest, stupid, jejune, voracious, greedy, cruel, cowardly and evil.” Another possibility: Sophocles' Antigone, which seems fitting as a portrait of a tyrannical ruler whose reaction to resistance is brutality (although Jean Anouilh’s version, written during the Nazi occupation of Paris, might supplement the original Greek version). And finally, Friedrich Schiller’s 1804 drama, William Tell, about an individual’s resistance in the face of inhumanity, and the moral questions that arise from his resistance.

Jacobs concludes:

This practice of breaking bread with the dead in times of crisis offers a threefold reorientation: - Emotional, because it gives you a break from people who are continually trying to stoke your feelings of anger and hatred; - Intellectual, because in comparing past situations with ours you get an increasingly clear sense of what about our current situation is familiar (and therefore subject to familiar remedies) and what unusual or even unique (and therefore in need of new strategies); - Moral, because, as Aragorn says to Éomer, “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”

Well said, Dr. Jacobs, and many thanks for providing me with inspiration to think differently about my reading. I think it might be wise to add to my list a re-reading of *Breaking Bread with the Dead” as well.

The theater is in desperate need of original ideas, but publishers like Palgrave, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge University Press are so focused on soaking academic libraries that they price their books beyond the reach of those who need these ideas most. This is one reason why I am planning to make available several of my theater books online for no charge. I was considering Pressbooks, but at $12/month for each book, I’ll be looking for alternatives. Anyway, charging almost a hundred bucks for a 300-page KINDLE BOOK is absurd.

“Although Bohr was not religious, he once pointed out that paradoxes were a fixture of religious parables and koans because seemingly contradictory statements were needed to breach the gulf between the human and the spiritual realms. “The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer,” he said. God, Human, Animal, Machine, by Meghan O’Gieblyn

This reflects pretty well what I mean when I talk about theater (or the arts) and spirituality or even religion. Theater historically has always had it roots in religion, noi matter what culture you begin with, and no matter how secularized it has become over the millennia, there still seems to be a single chord of the transcendent sounding somewhere in the background.

It seems to me that, as human beings, we need images, we need parables, we need paradoxes in order to remind us about an aspect of reality that transcends the everyday, or even is the foundation for the everyday. As a culture, we may have embraced the “immanent frame” (cf A Secular Age by Charles Taylor) in our daily life, but I think all of us in the back of our mind are aware of a transcendent lurking somewhere. And we can sense it powerfully, even indirectly, through the arts.

I just recently watched a mini-documentary on YouTube about the making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and for some reason I found myself thinking about the high transcendent stakes of that film. It seemed almost Greek in its scale, and at the same time, an odd retelling of the story of Jesus. I found myself imagining a film of, say, the Book of Mark with a young Jack Nicholson as Jesus and Nurse Ratchet as the Romans, and how that might affect our idea of Jesus' affect on his culture.

To a man with a book, the whole world is about Winnie-the-Pooh. In this rerun of Ezra Klein’s 2023 podcast about what he calls the “The Quiet Catastrophe,” Klein talks about the loneliness “epidemic” with Sheila Liming, and about her book "Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time," (affiliate link) and it just naturally dovetailed with “The House at Pooh Corner.” To be honest, what Klein and Liming consider a catastrophe I consider my happy place, but your mileage may vary. Still, Pooh and his friends in the Forest might have some things to teach us about hanging out, community, and what kind of culture we’ve created.

youtube.com/watch

A few days before Thanksgiving, I finished reading The House at Pooh Corner for the first time. I don’t remember being read to very much as a child, which may simply be a gap in my memory. My mother, who left school in 10th grade, wasn’t a big reader, so that makes sense; my father took us to the bookmobile that came to our neighborhood Monday evenings, and he’d read mostly biographies and sports books, and I inherited a few books that he owned as a child, but I just don’t remember him reading to me. Anyway, I’ve been dipping into classic children’s books lately to fill in the gaps.

My one encounter with Winnie the Pooh was in kindergarten when my teacher decided to read a few stories to us. We all gathered around her to listen, but I am ashamed to say that every time she said the name “Pooh” or “Pooh Bear,” I would started giggling uncontrollably and nudging my fellow kindergartners until she finally had had enough and closed the book in frustration. I still feel embarrassed about that.

Anyway, my wife had recently reread The House at Pooh Corner herself (she’d read it often to the boys when they were little), and she encouraged me to read it when she was finished.

The thing that stands out about reading that book now that I am 67 is the leisurely, casual way of living in which Pooh and his friends didn’t have play dates and organized activities, but got up in the morning and just wandered around until something occurred to them. Sometimes, it was a simple as going to visit everyone to wish them a happy Thursday, and that was enough. I also really felt the closeness of that little community, who, while they sometimes unthinkingly did things that bordered on cruelty, mostly spent their days helping each other with something or other, and sharing a Little Something, and wandering through the woods. They took time to listen to each other, and overlooked their friend’s peccadilloes (“Well, that’s just Eeyore”), and made up little songs.

Which is why the final chapter, “In Which Christopher Robin and Pooh Come to an Enchanted Place, and We Leave Them There,” hit me so hard. The first sentence announced “Christopher Robin was going away.” In earlier chapters, the animals figured out that Christopher wasn’t around mornings anymore because he was spending them at school, and apparently he would be going to school all day now, and may even be going away to school. The group of animal friends came together and decided to find Christopher to say goodbye, and Eeyore has written a poem that he was going to read to him. Eeyore found the writing much more difficult than he expected, and yet the difficulty of saying goodbye permeates all the gaps and frustrations:

Christopher Robin is going.

At least we think he is.

Where?

Nobody knows.

But he is going–

I mean he goes

(To rhyme with ‘knows’)

Do we care?

(To rhyme with ‘where’)

We do

Very much.

(I haven’t got a rhyme for that ‘is’ in the second line yet. Bother.)

(Now I haven’t got a rhyme for bother. Bother.)

Those two bothers will have

to rhyme with each other

Buther.

The fact is this is more difficult

than I thought,

I ought–

(Very good indeed) I ought

To begin again,

But it is easier

To stop.

Christopher Robin, good-bye,

I

(Good)

I

And all your friends

Sends–

I mean all your friend

Send–

(Very awkward this, it keeps going wrong)

Well, anyhow, we send

Our love.

END.

By this point, I was a puddle. Good-byes make me a mess.

They all went and delivered the poem to Christopher, except Eeyore couldn’t quite get it said, and so he gave the letter to Christopher so that he could read it himself, and by the time he was finished only Pooh remained behind. “It’s a comforting thing to have,” Christopher Robin said. And then he asked Pooh to walk with him. Where? Nowhere.

They walked for a while in silence, and then Christopher Robin asked Pooh what he likes to do best in the world. Pooh thought and finally said “What I like best in the whole world is Me and Piglet going to see You, and You saying ‘Well, what about a little something?’ and Me saying, ‘Well, I shouldn’t mind a little something, should you, Piglet,’ and it being a hummy sort of day outside, and birds singing.”

Christopher agreed, and said that his favorite thing was doing Nothing.

Pooh asks him how you do Nothing, and Christopher replied “Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it, What are you going to do, Chirstopher Robin, and you say, Oh, nothing, and then you go and do it…It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”

He then, suddenly,he starts blurting out all the things he’s learned at kindergarten, and I became aware that he was thinking about his future, and what he was leaving behind. “And by-and-by Christopher Robin came to any end of the things, and was silent, and he sat there looking out over the world, and wishing it wouldn’t stop.”

They hang out a little longer in the Galleons Lap – did I mention they’d walked to the Galleons Lap at the top of the Forest, an enchanted place where they can look out over the landscape – and Christopher makes Pooh a Knight. And then:

“Then, suddenly again, Christopher Robin, who was still looking at the world, with his chin in his hands, called out, ‘Pooh!’'

‘Yes?’ said Pooh”

‘When I’m–when—-Pooh!’

‘Yes, Christopher Robin?’

‘I’m not going to do Nothing anymore.’

‘Never again?’

‘Well, not so much. They won’t let you.'"

I’m pretty sure that last sentence will stay with me for a long time. I think of it as The Lament of Adulthood, the realization of what being a Grownup means. And it isn’t until you’re my age when, once again, they “let you.”

But after all the years of adulting, I’ve found it difficult to remember how to do Nothing. It takes time, or at least it has for me.

In the five years since I retired, I’ve written or edited five books. The voice in my head keeps pushing me to share the thoughts I had when I was too busy to write them down. And I’m glad I wrote them. But maybe it’s time to relearn how to “just go along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”

Because the only one not letting me now…is me.

When I left to take the dog for a walk this morning, I discovered a small, heavy box on the front porch. I hadn’t remembered ordering anything scheduled to arrive yet, but when I opened the box I found ten copies of the 3rd edition of my textbook, Introduction to Play Analysis! I’m delighted with this new edition, which really is a complete revisioning of the original. None of the analysis process is changed, but I’ve always felt as if the book would benefit from a demo of the analysis process “in action.” So we included the complete text of Susan Glaspell’s classic short play Trifles, and at the end of each chapter I applied the ideas described to the play. Thanks to some careful but ruthless editing, the new book is less than 20 pages longer than the original, so Waveland Press (a great publisher – thank you Don Rosso) was able to sell this edition with only a slight increase on the previous list price. I’m looking forward to seeing how it is received.

(This post is the result of writing I’ve been doing on my personal project.]

I’ve been reading Ivan Illich’s 1970 classic Deschooling Society and John McKnight’s The Careless Society. I’ve admired the ideas of these two people over the years, but it wasn’t until recently that I discovered that they actually knew each other and that McKnight was greatly influenced by the time he spent with Illich. Reading the two books side by side (not literally!), it is clear you can draw a line directly from Deschooling Society to The Careless Society. It is probably more accurate to say that McKnight’s asset-based community organizing, as outlined in [Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets]((https://search.worldcat.org/title/36708153) is the how-to to Illich’s why-to. McKnight focuses on determining a community’s _assets _instead of its deficits; not what does it lack, but what does it have; not what can be done _for_it, but what can it do for itself. The goal is to allow the community to do for itself, rather than call on a “professional” to do it for them.

This feels right to me. It feels empowering. And the reason it feels empowering is that it is relying on what and who are to hand to shape their world. Nobody has to be professionally trained, nor do they need to have the latest gear to make everything all ooh-shiny.

There’s a guy my wife watches on YouTube who calls himself the Bike Farmer. He has a bike shop in Wisconsin and he posts videos of him fixing old bikes he’s rescued. He has a phrase he often uses–“Good enough for who it’s for”–that I think applies here. It isn’t that he’s proposing sloppy work and bad stuff–“good enough for government work”–but rather that most people don’t really have the need for all the bells and whistles. What they need is to get out on the road. But YouTube (or PeerTube) is jampacked with how-to videos showing you how to make or do something or repair something yourself. People helping people. And while, as with everything online, there is some pressure to “monetize” their videos, most people make videos because they like sharing their skills.

My friend Tom (@apoorplayer) recently posted a video he found and PeerTube that was a song called “Shitty Gear.” The Toronto musician, whose name isn’t used on the webpage that I could see, writes “it’s me playing various lower quality instruments in an effort to demonstrate that you can make okay music with inferior equipment.” And the song is really good! And I definitely “vibe” with that idea, and I think McKnight would too. People have lost the understanding that they can often make what they need themselves from materials that they already possess or can get cheap. Instead, they think in terms of the “best” (meaning “most expensive”), and if they can’t afford the best, then they do nothing at all.

This is true for theater people. How many years do young people spend waiting tables, going to auditions, and working in the theater only intermittently, when the amount of money they are spending could be used to create their own theater where they and their fellow artists can actually do the work they want to do. They don’t need the most expensive lighting and sound equipment, or a scene or costume shop; they don’t need to spend a bunch of money on marketing; they just need to do the work. Do a show in your apartment, in your back yard, on the library’s stage, in the church basement or senior center.

Look around at your neighborhood, at your friends, and see what assets you have available, and then build on that. In many ways (and I just realized this), my previous two books, Building a Sustainable Theater and DIY Theater MFA are built on this concept of asset-based organization. You don’t need the institutionalized approach – just do the work!